St. Nicholas is one of the most popular of all saints: patron of Russia and Greece and of many classes of people, from children to prostitutes. 

In his 2015 speech to Congress, Pope Francis included Dorothy Day among his list of four “great Americans” who offer a “new way of seeing and interpreting reality.”

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in Hurley, New York. Her parents named her Isabella, a name she abandoned at forty-six when she took up her calling as a prophet and preacher.

Vinoba Bhave was widely regarded as the spiritual heir of Mahatma Gandhi. Born to a devout Brahmin family in Bombay, he had wavered in his youth between pursuing the life of a spiritual seeker or joining the resistance to British colonial rule

Though as a child she wished for nothing more than to become a Carmelite nun, Elizabeth Catez acceded to her mother’s condition—that she await her twenty-first birthday.

In November 1938 the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany offered the world a brazen display of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Many Church officials turned a blind eye, but not Bernard Lichtenberg, provost of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral.

Clarence Jordan believed the most vital need for reconciliation in the South was between blacks and whites. At that time, such talk was considered dangerously radical.

On September 21, 1990, Rosario Livatino, the magistrate for the court of Agrigento in Sicily, was driving to his office unescorted when a car drove him off the road.

Caryll Houselander, an English laywoman, had a definite sense of her vocation: to awaken others to the presence of Christ in the world.

In his life and in his relationship with the world, Francis represented the breakthrough of a new model of human and cosmic community.